Trump Admin Investigating Why IRS Nominee's X Account Followed Sexual Content

Yahoo

20-05-2025

Donald Trump's nominee to lead the Internal Revenue Service, Billy Long, is famous for mixing it up on the social media platform X, previously Twitter. Representing Missouri in the House, Long once earned the title of Congress' most prolific tweeter.
A Rolling Stone audit of Long's social media diet on X — in particular the publicly listed selection of accounts recently followed by his account — has uncovered a pattern of following sexual and 'Not Safe For Work' content. A senior Trump transition official blamed this activity on 'unauthorized' account access, insisting that Long would never have followed these accounts of his own accord.
Long, 69, is a controversial pick to lead an agency that Trump has demanded target his ideological foes. Long's nomination has been dogged by his past promotion of a tax-avoidance scheme, and because he has touted a 'dubious' credential as a tax professional. Senators have also raised questions about a flood of contributions from corporate interests that paid off Long's lingering campaign debt, received following his nomination. Long is scheduled for a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Tuesday.
Long seeks to join the Trump administration at a moment when the conservative political movement is in the throes of a pornography panic. A GOP bill in the Senate seeks to make porn illegal. Project 2025 — the arch conservative policy playbook now broadly being implemented by the Trump administration — calls for porn creators and purveyors to be incarcerated. As IRS commissioner, Long would also be responsible for safeguarding the information of hundreds of millions of Americans.
Billy Long has been tweeting since 2009. His current screen name identifies him as 'Congressman Billy Long.' The platform does not show all of the accounts that a user follows, rather a selection of the 50 most-recently followed accounts. The publicly visible list of accounts Long has followed includes many politically canny choices, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, EPA honcho Lee Zeldin, as well as the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
But Long's account has also recently followed many purveyors of adult-themed content. Some post content that is mildly sexually provocative. Other accounts post porn. The former congressman campaigned as a staunch 'pro-life' candidate. The recent following activity on Long's account points to broader interest in pregnant women.
One eye-catching account recently followed by Long's account goes by the handle 'Pregnant Redhead.' This is not a porn account; quite the opposite. The creator produces content in the genre known as 'trad wife,' which celebrates pastoral stereotypes of strong men and passive women, and posts images with SFW allure.
'I wear a ribbon because I am my husband's gift,' Pregnant Redhead writes in one post picturing her on a boat in a pond. The account also posts memes of women in head-scarves and dresses, with captions like: 'You don't have to dress half naked to be beautiful.' It's not entirely surprising that a politician like Long might publicly follow a trad wife account, given the genre's resonance in right-wing culture.
However, other accounts followed by Long's account post unabashedly sexual content, including of pregnant women. These X accounts might be described as stealth porn. Nothing in the handle or the profile picture identifies the account as NSFW. But the posts are dominated by sexual images of women.
One of these accounts has only a single piece of content — a 'repost' of an adult creator who lists her age as 26 and describes herself as a 'big booty milf.' (MILF is an acronym for a popular porn category involving mothers.) The post caption reads 'I fuck back,' and it features a video loop of the adult creator, filmed naked from behind, riding a dildo.
Another account followed by Long's account has posted multiple images and gifs of adult content creators who are with child. These include teasing, clothed, video loops of an Only Fans creator named Erika who encourages viewers to 'Check out all my exclusive pregnancy content.' The same X account has also posted a naked image of another pregnant creator, who advertises herself as a '42YR OLD NATURAL MILKY MILF!' A third account followed by Long's X account has only two posts, including a repost of a provocative image from an account with the handle 'SpicyMoms2.'
Yet another account that Long's account recently followed features a 'pinned' picture of a shirtless man unzipping his female companion's top and a caption reading 'THIRST.' The image is overlaid with a poem: 'I yearn to make love to you hard and deep, invade the delicate folds of your wondrous need until you blossom all over my lips, tongue and fingertips.' This account also posts many pictures of women in high heels and lingerie.
In response to questions from Rolling Stone, a Trump senior transition official insisted that the sexual content followed by Long's account was the result of a hack. 'This is absolute bullshit and not something the congressman would ever do,' the official said. 'Clearly there has been unauthorized access to the account in the 11th hour before his hearing, and we are currently investigating the matter, including reporting it to X.' (Trump benefactor Elon Musk owns X.)
Long follows more than 8,000 accounts on Twitter. It is unclear whether the recent adult-oriented follows are in keeping with past practice. Rolling Stone requested access to the complete list of the accounts that Long follows. The Trump official declined to make that available. Subsequent to Rolling Stone questioning, Long's account appears to have unfollowed Pregnant Redhead and other sexually themed accounts.
Long's account also recently followed a set of accounts that are interesting only because of whom these users follow — namely lots of adult content creators. One such account has a single, banal post from 2017. But the user's following list is predominated by adult creators. A second account in this vein features a single selfie post, and a following list filled with adult material. A third account also follows this pattern.
Long is seeking a position of enormous prestige and power, and also represents a Republican Party whose culture war has put porn in the crosshairs. Long's former congressional colleague Sen. Mike Lee recently introduced a bill to outlaw pornography. Project 2025, the conservative policy playbook for the Trump presidency, insists that porn is not protected by the First Amendment and that 'its purveyors are… misogynistic exploiters of women.' It calls adult entertainment 'as addictive as any illicit drug' and 'as psychologically destructive as any crime,' and demands its creators and distributors be jailed and for the platforms 'that facilitate its spread' to be shut down.
The IRS, the agency that Long seeks to run, has previously been marred by controversy over IRS employees who looked at adult content on work computers. The IRS also must enforce tax laws on adult performers, who have unique tax situations, and have been implicated in complex tax dodges.
It is somewhat difficult to establish Long's personal or political views on pornography. In part, that's because Google searches surface adult films — made by a completely unrelated male, same-sex creator who uses 'Billy Long' as his nom de porn.
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